It’s not just you: Massive internet outage is sweeping the East Coast

If it seems like your internet browsing is hitting more walls than possible today, you’ll be happy to know that it’s not your computer. A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is striking down lots and lots of web pages, leading to huge hiccups on a number of domains. Amazon is reporting the issue on its AWS dashboard, citing “Increased Error Rates,” which is a fancy way of saying that something is seriously broken.

Amazon Web Services is the cloud services arm of Amazon, and its Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is used by everyone from Netflix to Reddit. When it goes down — or experiences any type of increased latency or errors — it causes major issues downstream, preventing content from loading on web pages and causing requests to fail.

“We’ve identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,” Amazon explains on its services tracking page, adding that the issue “is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue.”

These instances are always a great reminder of how much of the internet relies on just a handful of huge companies to keep it up and running. An issue with Amazon’s S3 service creates a problem for countless websites that rely on their storage product to be up and running every second of the day. Unfortunately, there’s always ghosts in the machine, and downtime is inevitable. Let’s all pray that Amazon gets everything sorted out in short order.